Hello Moon! + Bearing witness to innovation in food and beverage engineering at HK Starbucks
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Daytime mobile phone camera shots of the Moon, at least the ones snapped by yours truly on the devices I’ve used in recent years, come out better than nighttime attempts. I took these through a rear passenger window of a moving taxi on July 1st.
On the same day, S. and I stopped in at a Starbucks. Mid-Autumn Festival is still months away but mooncake promotion has already begun. The moving part of the display in this video rotates counterclockwise. The stop-and-reverse you see here is the result of my having reverse-mirrored the frames from the short, jittery handheld phone video I took at the store so that it could play smoothly in a loop.
Enough health benefits have been ascribed to matcha, prepared and consumed in certain ways, to pique my interest. I have consumed plain-ol’ pure matcha powder mixed in water, which is the base case for matcha. Unfortunately, I found it extremely unpalatable. Enough so that I gave it up. Consequently, I’m not very keen on consuming matcha-enriched products.
If they’re packed with the genuine article, the smell or initial taste would give me the dry heaves unless perhaps the aroma and flavor were masked with large amounts of flavoring or sweeteners, which wouldn’t be very healthy anyway. And that’s assuming they contain meaningful amounts of matcha powder rather than green dyes and minuscule levels of matcha. More of a coffee guy. So I’m not the target demographic for a matcha latte with tofu “pudding” (presumably made with soy “milk”. We opted for iced espresso-based drinks.
The pastry pickings, as you can see in the photo above, were slim indeed. We went with one of the mango passionfruit mochi cheese tart
, a new-to-us HK Starbucks baked goods marvel.
The mention of cheese in its name suggested a possibility that it contained cheese in the same sense that a cheese danish contains cheese or a slice of cheesecake contains cheese. The presence of the word “mochi” inspired trepidation because the defining characteristic of mochi, their sticky rice-goop shells, means that they’re on par with, say, a maraschino-cherry-in-syrup chocolate bonbon in blood-glucose-spike-y terms but much less flavorful and with added unpleasant texture. But the tart surface, underneath the mango cubes and pistachio clippings, looked reassuringly similar to the top of a creamy egg tart and curiosity won out. Maybe there weren’t really any mochi inside. Or maybe there was just one and it was small. Or the rice-gloop layer was as thin as the shell of an M&M and the passionfruit filling dominated.
There were indeed mochi within. In the photo above, you can see a tendril of rice-goop extending outwards from the center of one of the white balls. When I plucked at them with the tines of a fork, they seemed to possess rice goop’s telltale freshly-discarded-bubblegum consistency throughout and completely white, with no visible filling. Passionfruit would be yellow or yellow-green.
There was some cheese flavor, but the taste of flour was more pronounced. The tart filling around the marble-sized mochi was bread-like, with a crumbly texture reminiscent of frozen pound cake. The deceptive appearance of the tart’s exterior may have been achieved using extra egg wash steps, but we’ll likely never know.
I wrote the first draft of this post on July 3rd.
Update (July 5th)
Fiddling with the settings, mostly turning the exposure down as low as it would go, in the camera app that I use (OpenCamera), I got some images that are no worse than the daytime photos.